Email courses for photographers

The constraint: your course has to work with the pictures switched off

Outlook on Windows blocks remote images by default, several corporate gateways strip them entirely, and a reader on a slow connection sees alt text first and sometimes only. An email whose meaning lives in a photograph arrives meaningless for a substantial minority, and none of them will tell you, because from their side you sent a blank email.

There is a second, duller constraint: size. A photograph pasted into the body rather than linked inflates the message by roughly a third over its file size, and a message past about a hundred kilobytes is cut short in Gmail, which is where the unsubscribe link and your address live. Link the images and keep the lesson in the text.

Write each day as prose that teaches something completely, then add one photograph as evidence. The sentence "move so the window is behind you and see what happens to their eyes" is the lesson. The picture proves it. With images blocked, the reader still has the lesson, and with images on they get the proof, which is the right way round.

What the five days should teach

Teach the reader to take better photographs of their own life with the phone in their pocket. Not gear, not editing, not your workflow. Most photographers resist this, because it feels like teaching people not to need you, and it is the one that works: a parent who learns to see light knows exactly how hard your job is.

Every lesson must be doable today with a phone, at home, in five minutes. One rule per day, stated as an instruction rather than a principle. Put them by the window. Get down to their height. Stop asking them to smile and ask them to do something. Wait for the second expression, not the first.

Day four is the mistake, and for most photography readers it is the same one: the posed group shot that everyone is told to take and nobody ever looks at again. Explaining why the picture people actually keep is the one from eleven minutes earlier, when nobody was ready, teaches the whole of your aesthetic in one email without a single technical term.

Day five gets them to their own result: find the best photograph on your phone from the last year, work out which rule it follows, and then do something with it. Almost everyone has thousands of photographs and no prints, and a course that ends with one picture on a wall has changed something real.

The objection your readers arrive with

For a booking business, the reader is comparing four photographers on price and availability and has no way to compare on anything else. Every portfolio looks good and every website says the same three words. A course that teaches them to see changes what they are comparing on, because a reader who understands light looks at four portfolios differently than they did last week.

The unspoken version, especially for family and wedding work, is that they are self-conscious. They think they are not photogenic, and the prospect of a day of being looked at is genuinely unpleasant. A course answers that gently, by teaching how the thing works: what you actually do to make somebody look like themselves, and how little of it depends on them.

For print and fine art the objection is different again. It is not "why you" but "why a print at all", in a house where every picture is already on a phone. That course teaches looking rather than shooting, and the ask at the end follows from it.

What your sign-up page has to say

Say that the course is about their photographs, not yours. It is the sentence that distinguishes this from every other photographer newsletter, and it reads as unusually generous because it is unusual.

Tell them a confirmation email is coming and ask them to look for it, including in whichever tab their mail app files promotions under. This is worth a sentence here more than in most trades: your lessons are made of photographs, picture-heavy mail is filtered hardest, and a reader who has already fished one message out of the promotions tab is a reader whose day one is not sitting there unopened.

And say that booking is not a prerequisite. A page for a booking business should carry a plain link for anybody who already wants a date, because a portion of your readers arrived ready to enquire, and making them read five emails first is a good way to lose them to somebody with a contact form.

The lines a photographer sign-up page has to carry:

• That the five days teach them to take better pictures of their own family, with the phone they already have.
• That every lesson takes five minutes at home, with no equipment.
• Five emails, one a day, each one doable before the school run.
• That the lessons follow a confirmation click, so nobody is signed up by somebody else typing their address.
• A direct link to enquire, for readers who already want a date and do not want a course.
• What day six is, and what else arrives afterwards.
• Whether the emails contain photographs, so a reader on a metered connection knows what is coming.

What the day-six email asks for

For a booking business, ask for an enquiry with a date in it. A date turns a warm feeling into something you can put in a calendar, which "get in touch" does not. Say what you charge, or where the prices are, in the same email: readers who cannot find a price assume the worst and quietly leave.

For a print business, ask them to print one photograph, and make it easy for that to be their own. A course that ends by selling only your prints undoes five days spent on theirs. A reader who prints their own picture and then, weeks later, buys one of yours for the other wall is the same business with the sequence in the right order.

In both cases, name the thing that is scarce, honestly. Weekends in September. A print run that ends. Scarcity in this trade is usually real, which means you never have to invent any, and a reader who has met five days of straight teaching will notice immediately if you start.